Building with Style: Fencing in the Wind

Many years ago a friend of mine at MIT did research to find out which type of wooden fencing provided the most effective wind break. His experiments with a wind tunnel showed that the ideal configuration was a fence with horizontal slats that had small openings at the top and larger openings at the bottom. I recalled his experiments when I set out recently to design and build a wind break to protect a seaside garden that gets blown by westerly winds. Specifically, his test showed that the ideal wind break fence: • used horizontal boards with about 50% of the fence open; and • was 25% open at the top, graduating to 75% open at the bottom (see Figure 1). My friend’s